Iomega begins shipping new FireWire REV drives

DATA STORAGE LEADER IOMEGA has begun shipment of its brand new FireWire version of its Iomega REV drive. The new product, the REV 35GB 1394/Firewire drive, allows Mac users a supposedly powerful, high-performance way to back-up there machines or for large, portable file storage.

The REV drive was originally launched back in April, and available in USB 2.0 and ATAPI models. The device got praise from the computer industry and press, and was presented with the "Best of CeBIT America" award. SCSI and Serial ATA models are expected to arrive later in the year.

This new FireWire drive comes in a two-tone design - white and light grey, in order to coordinate with the Mac's other products. That ought to keep fashion-conscious computer-yuppies happy, at least. Each REV FireWire drive will come with a Mac-formatted REV disk, so you can get to work straight out of the box. The disk can apparently be "easily reformatted" for PC users.

The kit isn't too clunky, either - the drives are smaller than a deck of playing cards at 10 x 77 x 75mm. You'll be able to fit 35GB of storage on each disk, useful if you can afford the $399.99 pricetag Iomega is slapping on.

Apparently, the drive has a read-write performance of up to 25 MB per second, which is obviously faster than writing to CD or DVD. To help you with transferring your files, Iomega is bundling software in with the drives, which includes features such as automatic file backup, full system backup/recovery, and software-based compression. For Mac users, you'll get the Dantz Retrospect Express software, compared to PC users who are given the Iomega Automatic Backup Pro software and Symantec's Norton Ghost for REV software.

If you want one of these drives, you'll have to pay a hefty price - each drive (with one disk included) ships at $399.99. Mac-formatted disks are available separately for around 60 dollars each. µ